Amendations

The US House voted 338-88 for the USA Freedom Act, amending the Patriot Act to end the bulk collection of Americans’ phone metadata, Jennifer Steinhauer reports for The New York Times. Instead, that data would be held by private telcos, and the NSA or FBI would have to get the approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to access it.

On Twitter, journalist Glenn Greenwald, who shared the Pulitzer Prize for exposing the NSA’s surveillance programs, tweeted his praise for the news, saying “First time since 9/11 that powers justified in the name of terrorism will be reduced rather than increased.”

But CREDO Mobile, Demand Progress and Fight for the Future condemned the House members who backed the vote, saying that it wouldn’t end mass surveillance and could actually provide legal immunity to companies that unlawfully provide the government with their customers’ information. “Congress shouldn’t reauthorize a surveillance program that a federal court just declared illegal. But the House voted to do just that by passing the USA Freedom Act which could provide legal authority to continue some of the surveillance practices the judiciary just struck down,” said Becky Bond, Vice President of CREDO Mobile.

The ACLU says it still wants Section 215 of the Patriot Act to completely sunset, but that if the US Senate passes the USA Freedom Act, it should amend it to prevent surveillance of individuals “with no nexus to terrorism,” to ensure that irrelevant information is not held but immediately purged, and to add a public advocate role before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post explains why Facebook Instant may seem to be a good deal for its mainstream media partners, but also why the terms of that deal may get a lot worse over time.

Dave Pell takes to Medium to complain that Facebook Instant institutionalizes a two-tiered system biased against content that doesn’t get the “instant” treatment, and that “Facebook is essentially trying to become the Hotel California of the Internet.”

Using data provided by Facebook, Nisha Chittal of MSNBC reports that Hillary Clinton is getting more buzz there than any of the declared Republican candidates.

Women Action Media! released the results of its pilot study of Twitter users experiencing gendered harassment and abuse on the platform, complete with infographics and recommendations for improvements. Among the latter: A call for Twitter to improve its definition of online harassment, make abuse reporting more sensitive to victims, make it easier for users to filter out abusive mentions, take tougher actions against online abusers beyond suspension, and diversify Twitter’s leadership to include more women and minorities.

Here’s a map showing tweets from UK police in London, updated every five minutes, made by Matt Ashby. He also has made maps showing current tweets from the country’s national police air service and British transport police.

Former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe has been elevated to chief adviser to Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, as well as a member of its board, Kara Swisher reports for Re/code.

More states are embracing online voter registration, the Pew Charitable Trusts reports, and by the end of 2014 five states had started offering citizens “without a state ID or driver’s license the opportunity to complete a voter registration over the internet.”